Thoughts on web development, tech, and life.

Despite having helped build a startup 12 (!) years ago focused on keeping your address book up to date, despite the massive intervening adoption of smart phones and social networks, and despite being connected to an unusually tech-savvy cohort of friends and relatives, my address book is still a disastrous mess. Sound familiar? This thought always lingered in my head, but it confronted me full-force this weekend while my wife and I struggled in vain to produce an updated mailing list to announce the birth of our new son. We’d done this for our last child (sadly using a shared Google spreadsheet in absence of any more purpose-built tool), so we were only 2-3 years out-of-date, yet an astonishing 45% of the addresses of our friends and family needed updating, and the task was not easily achieved.

This led me to ponder why this seemingly tractable problem remains so stubbornly unsolved, and what, if any, hope lies ahead.

The false saviors

It’s hard to remember that when we started Plaxo in 2002, there was no iPhone, no Facebook, not even Friendster or Flickr. Our biggest opportunity was writing a Microsoft Outlook plugin. Since then, many people have said that the problem of out-of-date contact info would soon be a relic of the past. Smartphones would keep us seamlessly connected. Social network profiles would always contain our latest info. Number portability, Gmail, and mainstream messaging services would create long-lasting identifiers. The death of snail mail would obviate the need for physical addresses. And so on. We often worried about these trends, and in some sense they have each helped us get more connected, yet they clearly haven’t solved the core problem. Why not? A few reasons…

Contact info still changes frequently (esp. in aggregate). As mentioned above, nearly half of the people we sent birth announcements to last time physically moved in the past 2-3 years. Now in our age range that’s probably more than usual (buying a first house, getting a new job, etc.), but it’s still staggeringly high. And it’s not just physical addresses. I’m constantly wondering “is this the right email address or cell phone number to use for so-and-so, or is it dead / rarely checked these days?” Ditto for “who do I know who still works at [insert company here]?” Even using circles in Google+, I’m often wondering “gee, is my Googlers circle still a safe place for Google-only discussions?” Even when the info hasn’t changed, I’m often unsure if it’s still current. And of course I keep meeting new people, many of whom I haven’t ever collected the relevant info for (even if they wouldn’t mind me having it).

Social networks suck at contact info. As surprising as the staleness of our address list was, I was even more surprised how few of my contacts had their latest address in Google+, Facebook, or elsewhere online. Many of these people used to work at Plaxo, and all are online using social networks daily. Yet the info is either missing, stale, or not shared with me. Why? In theory, social networks subsumed Plaxo-like functionality, but in practice there are deep reasons why they fall short.

Contact info is buried. I have to click to someone’s profile, click to their about/contact tab, scroll down, and then hope their info is shared with me. When’s the last time you viewed your own “about” tab (let alone someone else’s contact info section)? It’s out of sight, out of mind. In fact, even my own home address was out of date on Google+ and Facebook until long after I moved. It’s just not something you naturally think about while checking your news feed.

You don’t want everyone to have your info. Even though most social networks provide a way for you to share personal contact info, most users don’t want all of their “friends” to have all of their personal details. I recall hearing back in the day as Facebook grew that more people were actually deleting their contact info because they were making more and more loose-tie friends who they didn’t feel comfortable sharing that info with. On Google+ you can (of course) use circles to finely control who sees your home info, and Facebook has since followed suit, but as my wife put it when I asked her today, “eew, I don’t want to put my home address on Facebook”. You have to trust the site itself, your ability to navigate their privacy controls (and keep them up-to-date as your life changes), and the site’s ability to honor your choices before you’ll use social networks to share sensitive info. For most people, that bar has not yet been met.

Oh, and that whole “data portability” thing. When I want to see if I have someone’s latest home address, where should I look? My address book? Only if I can pull in the info shared with me from social networks. Not surprisingly, Google+ syncs to Google Contacts, but everything else is still a walled garden. You have to go knock on all the doors. For every person you care about. Every time. Even though they chose to share it with you. Sound broken? I agree. But I guess we weren’t loud enough.

Smartphones aren’t smart about contact info. Your smartphone address book does a good job of following you around from device to device and desktop to mobile. The only problem is that it is syncing garbage data. You’d think that using it to send and receive phone calls, text messages, emails, and looking up driving directions would make your address book fresher and more complete. But you’d be wrong. Chalk it up to app fragmentation and no one really trying hard to solve the problem in the first place, esp. at the OS level. Even at Google, the Gmail Contacts team is separate from the android “People app” team, and most OEMs bundle their own separate address book. Good luck.

No one’s helping you scrounge. Another fascinating if infuriating aspect of my recent Labor Day labor to update our mailing list was how often I could find the addresses by scrounging through my email archives, text messages, and manually entered address book info. I’d even been to many of the homes I lacked addresses for! In the absence of a good contact info syncing solution, most people still solve the problem “out of band” via existing communication channels (“leaving now, btw what’s your address in SF?” “it’s 123 Fake St., see you soon!”). Yet nothing is helping you extract, save, and aggregate that info for the next time you need it. It’s still a painful, manual process that you need to “get good at”. And this is for close ties–not random acquaintances–so it’s surely just an “entropy” problem, not a “stalking” problem.

The wisdom of crowds? Another trend I was sure would take off in the age of the cloud was some kind of solution for pooling contact info between families, friends, and organizations. At Plaxo we used to always have the problem, “Who’s got the cell phone for that new guy we just hired?” and the answer was always “someone in the room” (you just don’t know who in advance, and you have to ask them first). Many families still have a designated aunt who dutifully maintains the conglomerated birthday and holiday card list. And “hey Garret, remind me what Pete’s new address is?” still gets the job done in a pinch without offending. So why does each address book still start from scratch as if it were the only record of knowledge in the universe?

A new hope?

In the years since leaving Plaxo to help start Google+, I’ve talked to nearly every “address book 2.0” startup that’s reared its head. Apparently I’ve got a reputation in the Valley for not being “over” this contact info problem. Many have offered clever twists, but none have fundamentally addressed the challenges above. And perhaps unsurprisingly, as a result, none have saved the world from its frustrating fragmentation. So why am I still eternally optimistic? Because it’s a real, mainstream problem, there’s no good reason people want fragmentation to persist, and increasingly smartphones do participate in the events that collect or verify contact info. Plus there’s still the cloud opportunity for making each other smarter. So how might such a solution emerge?

When trying to solve any complex social problem, one good question to ask is, “What does the ideal solution state look like?” In the case of up-to-date contact info, I’d argue we still don’t know. You could say it’s everyone being on a single social network and using it perfectly, but is that ever going to be realistic? I’d say it’s more likely a mix of assisted sync and scrounge. In other words: help me collect whatever’s been shared with me via social networks or communication tools. And the place to do that is logically a smartphone (backed by a cloud-hosted account). Google or Apple are, in theory, in a great position to make progress on this, but I suspect it will be a startup that gets the job done, since it can be their sole focus and brand identity.

Such a startup would have to embrace the messy reality I’ve outlined above and turn it into a strength. Use all the available APIs and other tricks to help me find the contact info that has been shared with me. Keep track of when it was last updated (don’t make me guess). Parse through all my emails and texts for stuff that looks like contact info. Use my phone’s location history to ask me whose house I just visited when it doesn’t look like a business. Remind me what email or phone number each contact last used, and let me easily ping them back if I need some updated info. Help me build custom lists for things like holiday or birth announcements, and use that as an opportunity to ask for updated info. And partner with sites like TinyPrints not only to send those cards but also to send change-of-address cards when I myself move (something you should also be able to detect using my phone). Once you start gaining traction helping individuals keep their address books up-to-date, add a layer to pool it with family, friends, and colleagues in a privacy-preserving way (e.g. an easy way to see who knows someone’s phone number, but you still have to ask them to share it with you).

Is there enough here to build a successful business around? You be the judge. But is this still a real problem that real people still wish someone would solve? Abso-f*cking-lutely.

I think one major issue is that synced and updated contacts is not perfectly achievable. The problem is that there really is not a huge motivation to keep the habit of updating your information on social networks with everyone. The platform should basically make it easy for people to politely decline and be discreet, and establish its own culture amongst its users. What would be needed is a standard on how would this information exchange is done. Someone should create a detailed RFP/spec sheet on how to get contact info from someone who knows that person, and make it real simple for developers to develop something around that API.

All of this is very true, but I’m still not sure it’s a “solvable” problem or at least that there is a much better solution than what we have today.

To me, identities have facets and evolve over time very much. A “contact” is more and more a facet of an identity. It used to be that people had the same snail mail address their whole life, but our parents showed that this wasn’t true anymore. We also change our phone numbers, emails probably more often than what we initially expected (or at least more than telcos expected) and web identities (profiles on social networks) are even more ephemeral (at least in their usage).

Of course, smart phones and social networks should have make all that much easier, but in practice, these are all walled gardens will *less* interrop…

If I were to build a tool that helps me keep track of my contacts contact info, I’d probably build a search engine. Something in which I could type a name (or a list of names), which would crawl the web, and every possible data source in search of these things. It would also probably be able to “ping” whatever it finds (phone numbers, emails, social network clients) to check that they’re still valid.

It would probably be some kind of “pull” method, rather than a sync!

Aside from this, it’s good to see you blogging again 🙂 Think about adding a http://subtome.com button to your site! instead of the Google button in the top left column which yields a 404.

Sarang Lakare

Hi Joseph, great article and I connect with you on all points. We are building the current generation Plaxo, if I may put it that way, for mobile phones: InTouchApp – with the goal to keep your phone book up to date. Check it out at http://intouchapp.com . Would love to chat with you (*sarang) on InTouch. Thanks.

Hey Joseph – Thanks for the great article. You nail the problems on so many of the pain points that we’re working hard to solve with FullContact.

What’s interesting about social networks, especially the walled garden ones, is that every one of them thinks that they’re the perfect solution while only making the problem harder to solve.

You’re absolutely right that nobody knows what the “perfect” solution is yet. We’re embracing the points that you mentioned. We use a combination of APIs, contextual data and algorithms that we’ve built to keep your address book constantly up to date…and we let you know when updates happen.

One huge difficulty that you point out is with mobile devices. Apple’s method has merit, but so does Google’s. Finding a way to work with both of them is an interesting challenge when it comes to offering a constant UX across devices.

Thanks again for the article. We know that contacts are important, but it’s always reassuring to see that we’re solving a problem for real people and not just for ourselves.

Good call, added! Spruced up my super old theme while I was at it. 🙂 Lemme know if you have any more suggestions. I’m clearly rusty at this blogging thing. 😉

Randy Schmidt

I was working on this problem a couple years ago but stopped because I didn’t think I could make money off of it.

I was picturing an open format where everybody’s set of data would be comprised of their contact info (obviously), a subscriptions list (UUIDs of people this person wants to track), a subscribers list (UUIDs of people to notify when the info changes (via a provider)) and a block list (List of UUIDs to not notify when there is an update). If someone abuses it you can block them. That doesn’t prevent them from previously copying down your info but at least you could block them, change your phone number, then the rest get the update.

Most people would use a provider (Facebook, Google+, FullContact?) to mask all the down and dirty stuff. The provider would insert your UUID and provider into the registry so that things that know your uuid can look up where to ask for your info (or who to update when your info changes). People could choose people-friendly identifiers (mine would be r38y) that when someone enters it is swapped for their UUID (machine friendly) and the UUID is used from then on.

So the registry would have friendly name, uuid, and provider. If you choose to change providers, the new provider updates the provider name and other providers know where to find you.

WHEW that is a lot… and probably doesn’t make any sense.

Anywho, I think it is a problem we should be able to solve but may not because humans are involved.

Harry

oomphlink was just released today for iOS. It tries to solve this very issue.

Rikk

I get comments almost weekly: “You need to create a Plaxo 2.0, it’s still a major problem!” And, I have been tempted several times, mostly out of the frustration you experienced recently. I have come to a few conclusions:

1. Six years was enough time to work on address book tech :-D,
2. Don’t try to solve the Two-Way-Sync-With-Other-Contact-Services problem (its too frigging messy, difficult, and out of your control),
3. Focus on a delightful mobile-first address book that imports from everywhere (active and passive) and syncs well between active users (the original Plaxo promise).

I believe that Plaxo’s egalitarian principle to not be the source of truth was a ball and chain that hampered us severely (a natural reaction to the spam and privacy hysteria of the early 2000’s).

David Johnson

I stopped using Plaxo when they stopped supporting their app that syncs with iPhone contacts. It just stopped working and, despite numerous complaints from users, they didn’t fix it. Unhappy.

Alexander Norman

Couldn’t agree more. This is a problem worth solving and I believe some people are trying to solve it (I have been experimenting with Humin and Triggerfox). The problem is not only tech but a human habit/motivation problem. A small subset of people (like me) will proactively update their contacts in a few places that can be scraped (e.g. Facebook) for the information. Most people change phones/addresses and they push the information to a subset of close friends via an email and think that covers it. There is no place they naturally think of updating the information. Who ever cracks this problem will have to automatically figure out people’s contact information has changed or will have to make it a habit forming destination for people to update their contacts. (Post offices have done this for physical mail, many people will fill out a change of address card).

Marika Ersher

This is an example of what I said in my post: “future is open and not based on platform apps”.

Michael

Plaxo’s iPhone app has been fixed and is currently working very well.

Elena Girolamo

Services as Fullcontact or oomphlink are not the future, because the are application for specific platforms. Future is open, so I like more services as GlipMe that allows using any mobile device.

Using public APIs to retrieve people data is still without future. Who owns data is creating walls and gardens. Look at LinkedIn, Facebook, Google or Microsoft data: they permits to access less data every day.

My 2 cents…

santoshgk

Joseph

Very interesting blog and discussion. I have two points to make –

1) Let us understand why we need “Mailing Addresses” and why not just be happy with “email or cell phone”? – In most of the situations all “electronic” communication can happen through email or blog or texting. You need mailing addresses when there is an expectation to “Ship” products between two parties or physically visit each other. This is where Privacy becomes key. That’s the reason people don’t like to share mailing addresses while they are open about sharing email or cell phone. So any solution which wants to address this challenge needs to respect privacy / Permission.

2) You are absolutely right, smart phones are more of “Contact Management” than “Address Management. – Any software or platform that wants to address this challenge, needs to have ability to leverage these contacts to do physical transactions (like shipping) without actually needing mailing addresses. Privacy still is important factor.

I believe there is a solution which exists to address the “addresses” challenges. This is being developed by a startup named mapmyid.com There patented platform and services could be the solution you are envisioning. Very senior executives from Amazon, eBay, JPMC, VISA, Rackspace, Stanford and couple of ecomemrce platforms folks are supporting / working together to address the “addresses challenge”

Their service “Ship2MyID” actually removes the need of addresses to do any physical transactions. “Ship any thing to any one without need of mailing addresses” What PayPal does to money, they do for Shipping.
– All they need is receiver’s contact information (email, cell #, facebook , linkedin id)

– Sender has the ability to buy from an ecommerce store and ship it to pretty much all of their contacts in cell phone (download ios app nextgencards.com which does exactly that)
– Receiver has 100 % control on whom to receive from, where to receive and when to receive.
– Addresses are never shared between both the parties.

Check them out 🙂

santoshgk

Btw if you folks do want to try nextgencards ios app.. please feel free to use my personal free code “loyal3009” – NO credit cards, No payments and NO Mailing addresses 🙂 A real card is printed, stamped and posted.. Happy weekend

> Parse through all my emails and texts for stuff that looks like contact info.

Heard about Evercontact?

Roger Prang

Here I am reading a blog, that is 3 years old, that I got to by doing a search for Plaxo. You all obviously know what that is. I agree with Joseph. What you all fail to see is that a person needs to update there info some where, for someone to find it. If they don’t tell anyone, then you are screwed.
The whole social media idea won’t work because everyone is so afraid that their information will be hacked, and then their identity stolen, people like me, so people hide it or don’t put it out there at all. I don’t want to put anything into social media that can hurt me later when the bad guys hack the site. Paranoid? Maybe, but just because I am paranoid does not mean that they are not out to get me.
Even if people do try and change their information, somewhere, if they just happen to forget you for any number of reasons then… you are screwed. I know this blog is three years old as are all of the entries, so I am sure this will get to no one. OH WELL!

This is an old blog (the best I have come across on the subject) but still the problem is so widespread. This very problem has made become my sole focus and we’re about to release a free app. I am collecting some market feedback and beta testers on http://www.known2me.com
If you can spare a minute then please help out! Thanks in advance!